@hddnewbie:
For the benefit of the archives and people searching via Google, neither of those ddrescue command lines are optimal for at least 2 different reasons in your case - but you might get lucky. Insufficient data supplied (publically) so far, to know which one is least likely to be a waste of time; they might both be.

Anyway, I'm really glad you're getting help from someone else now, as that gets me off the hook. Good luck!

@dmarques:
Agreed! That's what I find more & more in life - if we make things look easy, through skill, practice, experience etc., some other people wrongly assume that they are easy.

Hi again

If you just tell me which tool to use for my purpose (since I can't find it), you can be on the hook again.
You know I need your help badly in order to solve this.

Thanks.

pm 'd you with followup

pm 'd you with followup

Hi again

I have succeed in getting all data off the drive

But windows is not accepting this hard drive yet.
I have formatted it in NTFS, but that does'nt help.
Ubuntu rescue -> Testdisk gives me different messages:

Analyze says bad sector count. No partition is bootable.

Quick search and then "p" to list files gives: Can't open file system. File system seems damaged.

Advanced -> Boot gives:
Boot sector status: OK,
Backup boot sector status: OK
Sectors are identical


Any ideas?

Thanks

Hi again

Since I got the data off the drive, I thought I could experiment a little with it.
Before recovering data we made a clone to an external harddrive using ddrescue.
Remember that I couldn't do anything with windows when this drive was connected, so I plugged in the external hard drive to see what was to happen. It showed up in device manager but nothing in file explorer. I restart the computer, and it hung at the logout process.
I pulled the usb cable, and the process continued.

Clearly Windows is now allergic to both drives (which are the same).
Common sense now tells me that this is not some kind of physical error, it must be the "structure" on the drive that is corrupted.
So, I pulled out a perfectly healthy external hard drive and used ddrescue to make a clone to the troubled external hard drive.
I was not doing it for the data, rather to give som healthy "structure" back to the drive.

Guess what? It worked like a charm
Then I did the same to the internal hard drive (the one that started all of this). And that worked too.....
(All three drives have the same size)

Thanks to you and Linux we did it.
I won and I could let this go now, but still......Even if this is rocket science, it was created by man, so someone should be able
to tell us what happend, right? Or at least a theory.
(Ok, I understand that more information is needed)

Have a nice day

clone disk, recreate a new sector 0 using data elsewhere on the drive. (assuming this is a windows box)


also, get rid of your boot signature until you are pretty sure the clone is really good, or fixable. You can always just mount in r-studio without the boot sig anyways if you really want to do it that way.


Regards,

Hi russwinters

I don't understand anything of what you are saying

Should I not trust the solution I had to resolve this?
Could you explain (for dummies) what I need to do?

Thanks